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Another Internet Griswold's Controllable Christmas Lights

Posted by timothy on from the moving-toward-the-source dept.

An anonymous reader writes: For over a decade, Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights have been a festive online holiday tradition for millions of Internet users world-wide, so it was sadly the end of an era last year, when the Griswold wanna-be hung up his Santa Hat in 2014. But with the "Internet of Things" being the rage these days, it didn't take long for another Griswold to emerge from the North Pole, or at least pretty darn close to it. Ken Woods from Fairbanks, Alaska has his house online 24 hours a day with a dozen ON/OFF buttons that Internet users can use to toggle his lights with a click of a mouse. Here's a video of it in action and he uses Amazon EC2 to power it online. (While that all looks real, low-UID /.'ers will remember that Alek did a simulation from 2002-2004 using Perl code to switch between a series of images. Looks like the prankster dusted off that code for the Control Christmas Lights.com website.) I, for one, welcome our new Griswold Overlords with a big HO-HO-HO.

1 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Is this interesting anymore? by clifwlkr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Given that you can buy several brands of light switches off of the shelf in home depot now that are internet controllable, how is this even fascinating anymore? I went to the page and it looks like something from the early 90's, and basically the queue is so backed up the lights are just constantly turning on and off. I mean in my own house I can turn the lights on and off through voice, and even that I don't really consider impressive anymore. Seems like time to come up with something new, or a new take on it.

    Maybe I am just being grinchy, but I was doing stuff like this back in the 90's and now it just seems a bit lame. Kudo's for them having fun with it, but I so desperately want to re-write that web page for them in angular or something so it doesn't make my head hurt....

    So slashdotters, what would be 'the next thing' that would be far more interesting with the capabilities we have today? We should be able to come up with something pretty neat given the tools at our disposal.